Being a real man

Let’s not insult men just because they don’t show up in the labor statistics. The government doesn’t have them officially linked up with a tax-withheld-from-wages-paid job, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t functioning members of the community.

As someone who used to be one of those men, yes it does. A real man has a job.

Some of those men might be independently wealthy, living off their trust funds. Some of those men might be students. A vanishingly same percentage might be stay at home husbands. Some may be trying to start a business, not yet making anything, and living off their savings. Some are probably working the “black market”.

But the vast majority of those men are failures, unemployed men who would rather be employed.

Now, David Brooks is an idiot. The main reason those men can’t find jobs is because too much government is screwing up the economy, and strangling the recovery. His prescription for the problem is totally bass ackwards.

But his diagnosis is correct. To be an adult man is to have a job, to do work that is valuable enough that people are willing to pay you for what you are doing.